Best Online Coaching Platform to Manage Your Practice

Coaching has grown significantly since the 1980s, not only in sports, but in almost any area of human endeavor.

Professional coaches now help clients reach their goals in areas as varied as health and wellness, business and executive development, and financial management.

There are now numerous high-quality programs offering certificates or degrees in coaching (Edblad, 2020).

There is also a growing body of peer-reviewed literature on best coaching practices (Journals, 2020).

Clearly, as coaching practices grow, the need for effective practice management increases.

In this article, we will explore the best online coaching platform to help coaches manage their practices and connect with clients in innovative and impactful ways.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free. These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

The Benefits of Using a Coaching Management Platform

Advantages for coaches using online platforms include:

• Cost-effectiveness
  Online practice can involve significant savings on commuting, travel, office rental, and supplies.
• Time savings
  An effective coaching management platform can streamline activities such as developing client content, creating contracts, and billing, leaving you more time to help your clients.
• Ready access to coaching tools and client data
  This includes activities for clients to complete between coaching sessions and data to monitor progress.

Potential disadvantages of online coaching, depending on the platform used, can include:

• Slow, buggy chat and other communication tools on less sophisticated or reliable platforms.
• Lack of reliable encryption or other safeguards to protect confidentiality of client information.
• Clients’ preconceptions about or past negative experience with online coaching could lead them to avoid even the best and most effective online platforms.

6 Things to Look for in a Life Coaching Platform

A quality coaching platform should be visually attractive and easy to use, for both coach and client.

It should include features and content that meet core coach and client needs.

To be comprehensive, a coaching platform should arguably include the following features (adapted from Gambill, 2021).

1. Administrative tools such as contract drafting, invoicing, and scheduling meetings with individuals and groups.
2. Remote communication tools such as text messaging, chat, and video conferencing.
3. Data monitoring and analysis to measure individual or team progress toward goals and determine best resource allocations and next steps, etc.
4. Content delivery tools to provide clients with activities, interactive classes, training modules, presentations, etc.
5. iOS and Android compatible.
6. Data security — All processes and content should be encrypted and HIPAA and/or GDPR compliant so that coaches and clients are assured of confidentiality and information security.

What Is the Best Online Coaching Platform?

A credentialed positive psychology coach recently reviewed several online coaching practice management platforms.

You can read more about the review in this article about the 17 Best Online Coaching Programs. As business needs vary from coach to coach, so too will the suitability of platforms.

Regardless of this variability, the one platform that received a highly favorable review is Quenza.

Quenza stands out, with:

• An excellent combination of visually attractive, user-friendly, streamlined functions
• Helpful administrative tools
• Innovative, science-based content and activities for clients
• Affordability

To date, Quenza has received very positive reviews by several software review sites, including G3, Capterra, softwareadvice.com, and nudgecoach.com (Gambill, 2021).

It has also been highly rated by individual customers, who often cite its elegant design, user-friendly features, time savings, and outstanding client support (Quenza reviews, n.d.).

How to Use the Quenza E-Coaching Platform

Quenza’s stated goal is to provide a user-friendly online coaching platform that will maximize your client outcomes.

The best way to explore whether Quenza is a good fit for your coaching management needs is to take a test drive.

Signing up for Quenza is fast, simple, and only $1 for an initial one-month trial.

If you decide to use Quenza following this trial, there are several plan options for a variety of needs: Lite, Standard, and Unlimited.

• The Lite version supports a 15-client roster, 20 coached Activities, and 5 “Pathways” (automated sequences of activities that address a given client need in depth).
• The Standard version supports a 50-client roster, 100 coached Activities, and 20 Pathways.
• The Unlimited version provides the best value for money. There is no limit to the number of clients supported, Activities, or Pathways.

With an annual subscription, the first two months of any of the above versions are free.

You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a subscription at any time.

Exploring Quenza

Let’s explore Quenza through the tabs or pages you can use to develop and manage a practice.

These tabs appear vertically on the left side of the Quenza screen, in a top-to-bottom sequence that follows a natural workflow for coaching management.

Dashboard

Clicking on the Dashboard tab will provide an at-a-glance orientation to your overall practice.

This includes:

• Any notifications you have received since last checking the site.
• Practice information such as:
  • The number of active clients you have
  • Client Activities in progress
  • Client Pathways in progress
  • The latest Expansions (additional pre-made content for clients)

Scrolling down the dashboard, you will find the latest blog posts on topics such as Quenza features and how to use them. You will also find the latest community posts from others using and discussing Quenza. Support staff promptly responds to posts by coaches seeking help or making suggestions.

The next tab is for building and managing your roster of clients.

Clients

The Clients tab allows you to add clients to your roster, view lists of active or inactive clients, and search for specific clients and their data.

Once you’ve added your first client to the system, you can start using Quenza in earnest to manage your practice.

Chat

Next comes the Chat function.

This is a very popular feature, based on feedback in community posts by coaches using Quenza.

Here, you can select the client with whom you want to chat and begin sending secure messages.

Activities

The Activity section has a helpful “show me how” tab with a brief video tutorial that walks you through the steps needed to send Activities to clients, tailored to their needs.

The Activities section includes pre-made, science-based activities applicable to a range of client needs. These are tagged by categories such as Evaluation, Exercise, and Meditation.

These Activities can be selected from given categories and sent by coaches directly to clients in order to build awareness and strengths in specific areas and monitor client progress.

For example, one particular exercise explores and clarifies a client’s “Five Most Important Values.”

Activities can be brief, like the “Three-Minute Breathing Space” in the Meditation category.

Activities can also be more in depth, like an exercise encouraging clients to imagine and interact with “Your Best Most Resilient Self.”

There are numerous items in the Evaluation category. These include a Session Rating Scale, where clients can rate various aspects of their last coaching session, including the fitness of coaching approach for them and overall quality of the last session.

In addition to a bank of pre-made Activities, this section allows you to build your own coaching Activities for clients.

A nice feature here is the drag-and-drop function, allowing you to pull customizable Activity blocks quickly into your new content, making it easy to construct and edit Activities.

For example, when building a self-report questionnaire on a client’s core values, you can drag a block for questions you want answered in short or long format, yes/no responses, or number scale responses. A text field enables you to write your question for the client, editing tools allow you to adjust font size and type, and a pre-set answer box collects client responses.

You can then add an image for this question and further customize by making the questions required or optional.

You can also add section markers to your Activities and page breaks that require a button to be pressed before moving to the next item.

Using the drag-and-drop feature, I found it quick and easy to build a cognitive health questionnaire with 10 items, in 3 distinct sections. I used the time saved on formatting my own form to create the questions themselves.

If you’re like me and prone to occasionally leaving a document without saving latest edits, there is a handy auto-save function to back up your Activities documents.

Your next decision might be to build an automated, scheduled sequence of Activities for a client, called a Pathway.

Pathways

For this, you move to the Pathways tab.

Here, you find a Pathway builder that allows you to create a sequence of Activities of a given type that will be automatically sent to clients on a predetermined schedule.

Pathway content can include documents or activities for intakes, onboarding, building strengths, and evaluating progress. Reminders to complete each task in a Pathway can also be sent automatically.

Expansions

The Expansion section contains more pre-made science-based content, regularly updated with new materials for the Activities and Pathways you send your clients.

Support

The Support section contains a searchable knowledge base, community message board, and tabs for suggesting new Quenza features and contacting the support team.

Based on review of coaches’ questions and the support team’s responses, questions are usually answered within 24 hours. For more complex questions, the support team communicates clearly where a given question stands and when a fuller or more definitive response can be expected.

Client portal

Your clients can also sign into their own accounts on Quenza, where they’ll find notifications from you about Activities sent, an undated to-do list, and a list of Activities completed or pending.

Additional features

Other features worth noting were either recently added or are in the works.

These include:

• White label branding.
  Allows coaches to send Quenza emails and documents to clients under their own brand.
• Wheel of life.
  Graphically tracks client progress toward personal goals in various areas, with the wheel of life, a fundamental starting point for many coaching sessions.
• Groups.
  Coaches can send Activities and Pathways to multiple clients.

At the time of writing, the following components are still being made available:

• Group chat.
  Coaches can chat with several clients in a group at once and allow those clients to chat among themselves.
• Files.
  Coaches and their clients will be able to share PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, and other documents securely.
• Multilingual client app.
  Initial support will be added for client communications in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Dutch. More languages will be added based on demand.
• Video conferencing.
  Coaches will be able to make and record secure video/audio calls with clients.

5 Key Benefits of Quenza Coaching Software & App

One immediate benefit of using the Quenza platform is having a visually attractive, user-friendly platform for your clients to see and use.

The interface with clients is enhanced by the white label function, which brands Quenza emails and documents you send to clients with your personal logo or practice identifier.

Another key benefit of Quenza is its organizing capacity. Quenza allows you to intake clients, maintain a client roster, access and develop Activities for clients, sequence these Activities as needed into Pathways, stay in touch with clients remotely by app, and track client progress, all within one integrated and streamlined system.

Perhaps the most important advantage of using Quenza is time and energy savings.

The computer software and app are meant to help you build and organize your client base, send and receive client content, and monitor client progress with the fewest clicks possible each time.

A major time and effort saver is the store of pre-made, science-based Activities and Pathways for use with your clients.

The drag-and-drop feature is also a time and energy saver when creating your own Activities and Pathways for clients.

The Pathways feature is not only helpful for having clients complete Activity sequences, but it can also help you be more thoughtful as a coach about building an integrated series of Activities with synergy toward client goals, instead of relying on standalone Activities with potentially less client impact.

Importantly, Quenza keeps your practice and client information highly secure. The platform uses a PIN sign-in that is convenient and useful as an added security layer.

Quenza also uses AES 256-bit encryption, which provides top-level information security and helps keep your practice HIPAA and GDPR compliant.

A Take-Home Message

Online coaching platforms have the potential to both streamline and expand your practice.

Gone are the days when you had to give a client an assignment and wait a week for its return to assess it. With online assigned homework, activities, and instant feedback, you can impact a client positively each day, helping them attain their goals quicker.

By keeping to online appointments instead of having to wait for another client who is running late, you can accommodate more clients in a day, more efficiently. Cost savings can be achieved by reducing office staff, space, equipment, and supplies.

Your clients will appreciate the closer contact, the security of chatting with you only by logging into the platform, and the efficiency with which you respond to their assignments. Not to mention, there’s no need to trek through traffic to meet their weekly appointments.

For a win–win situation, Quenza is the best online coaching platform with crucial administrative, client activity, and tracking tools. It is also a rapidly evolving platform, adding new and impactful features in response to user feedback.

The best way to know whether Quenza is a good fit for managing your own coaching practice is to sign up at Quenza.com. It is $1 for a one-month trial of everything the platform offers.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free.